Over the past decade, the world of digital marketing has evolved into a hyper-competitive landscape with channels saturated by incumbent ad dollars. To make matters worse, new online channels are rapidly emerging, evolving and fading just as quickly—think Myspace, Facebook, iOS, and Android.

This environment makes acquiring customers online a challenge for even the most sophisticated and well-funded marketers. For startups and entrepreneurs trying to find sustainable growth on shoestring budget, following the traditional marketing playbook simply won’t cut it, often leading to wasted time, effort, and resources focused on the wrong channels to the neglect of more significant opportunities.

This campaign-based approach to growth is expensive and unsustainable. Though these traditional channels can be effective, once you stop paying for access, the growth stops as well. This isn’t the case with growth hacking, which helps companies find truly sustainable growth expressly because it focuses on levers within the product itself. Growth hackers know that the fastest growing products grow not from traditional marketing tactics, but through the strategic use of the product’s capability.

Growth hacking is a new way of thinking about building sustainable growth through innovative marketing that delivers your must have product/service/experience to the right people. It has powered the rise of the latest billion dollar businesses: AirBnB, GitHub, Uber, Square, and more. These companies were built not through traditional marketing, but using an entirely new approach to growth.

At it’s core, growth hacking is experiment driven marketing. The growth hacker mindset, toolkit, and approach are different than that of the traditional marketer. Yet growth teams don’t replace marketing teams—they complement their efforts by focusing on in-product growth levers, leaving campaigns to the marketers.

Growth hacking gets confounded with different shortcut tactics, but the truth is that it has nothing to do with gimmicks. When you think of the metrics that truly matter—sales, user base, referrals, revenue, and so on—growth hacking is the sum of activities employed to move those metrics in a profound and scalable way.

Though growth hacking has been integral to the growth of the billion dollar companies mentioned above, it isn’t reserved for Silicon Valley alone, it can be used to help grow any business. In the current marketing climate, companies of all sizes are looking for new ways to grow that are both sustainable and cost effective.

The Growth Hacking Conference takes place at the Troxy in London on October 28th. A one-day intensive event, you will hear from the best growth minds about how to channel this experimental growth hacking mentality for your business.